Chapter 172: Fire in the Hall

The Castellan didn't sleep on Sunday night. It doesn't, as a rule. But on Sunday night it didn't sleep in a different way.

I know because at three in the morning I went down to the kitchen for bread and found the lamp by the garden door turned up, and the slate beside it covered in its small neat chalk, top to bottom:

Garden door. Shut.Stable arch. Shut.Lower hall gates, nine. Shut. Pinned.North tower roof hatch. Shut. Carol asleep.Chapel. Shut. Cat on the roof again. Not my concern.

And on down the slate, every door in Greykeep, one by one. At the bottom, in smaller letters:

Your father asked me to watch every door. I am watching every door. I would like to know what I am watching for.

I stood there with my bread and thought about it.

"Someone who doesn't need one," I said.

The lamp considered this for a long moment. Then the chalk moved again.

That is not helpful.

"No," I said. "I know."

* * *

On Monday morning Teague came up from Havenreach with mud to his knees and his hair standing up on one side, and sat down at the end of the kitchen table without being asked, which is how you know someone's started to live at Greykeep.

"Ten," he said.

Helena put a bowl of porridge in front of him. He looked at it as though he'd never seen porridge.

"Ten of the eleven," he said. "She did them all night. One at a time, at the fountain, with her feet in it. She asked them the same thing every time. Did you ever, freely. And they couldn't answer, because they couldn't talk, so she said she'd witness that too. The not answering." He picked up the spoon. "The marks went. Like breath off a window."

"And the eleventh?" said my father.

"Ned." Teague put the spoon down again. "His didn't go. Not all the way. Anwen says it's because he said he'd take it. On Tuesday. At the table. I'll take the oath if they make me. He said that out loud in front of Mary's ledger, and he meant it, and somebody wrote it down." He swallowed. "She says that's nearly a yes. She says it'll take longer. She says she's not in a hurry and neither's he."

Nobody said anything.

"He talked, though," said Teague. "This morning. Just before I came. One word."

"What did he say?"

Teague looked at his porridge.

"Mam," he said.

Helena put a second bowl of porridge in front of him, beside the first, and went back to the stove.

* * *

My father went down to the North Sands on Monday night to ask Grenna.

He went alone, on foot, from the Westmere Hold, the way you'd walk to a neighbor's house to ask a favor. He came back after midnight with sand in his boots and told my mother, who told Adriana, who told Mary, who wrote it down, which is how I know what was said.

He'd started to explain. About Cardle. About the war having started, and the priests coming back for the next sons, and the doors in the villages along the Coln, and what he'd been saving.

Grenna had said yes before he'd finished.

"I've been asked," she'd said. "I heard you ask. You can stop now and go home; you look tired." Then: "We'll go when the nights are long. They don't see well in the dark, those priests. We do."

* * *

Saba asked for a loom on Monday afternoon.

She'd brought her shuttle from the valley. She brought it everywhere; she'd had it in her lap all through supper on Saturday, when she asked Iselle the question, and she'd set it down on the table to ask. But a shuttle isn't a loom, and on Monday she sat in the little kitchen with it turning over and over in her hands until Helena, who can't bear to see good hands with nothing in them, asked her what was wrong.

"I've a cloth to finish," said Saba. "I started it nine years ago. It's been on my loom in the valley ever since, half done. I stopped the day they took her." She turned the shuttle over. "I brought the bolt. I didn't bring the loom. I'm a fool."

Grandpa heard. Grandpa always hears.

By Tuesday noon there was a loom in the great hall.

* * *

It wasn't a new one. Grandpa doesn't believe in new things when there are old things lying about that only want mending. It had been in the attic over the west range since before anyone could remember, in pieces, under a sheet, with a family of mice living in the breast beam. Grandpa and Ignatius and Brannoc brought it down on Monday evening, and Grandpa worked on it all night by lamplight, sanding and pegging and swearing quietly at the warp beam, and in the morning Saba came in and put her hand on it and said, "Oh. That's a good one. That's older than me."

They'd put it in the great hall because it was the only room with enough floor and enough light. The great hall has tall windows down the east wall, and in the morning the sun comes through them in long gold bars across the stone, and Saba said a loom wants east light the way a cat wants a lap.

So it stood there, by the east windows, with Saba's half-finished cloth strung on it. Blue, with gray in it, and silver where the light caught the thread. The color of a river in spring. The color of the Ilvane when it's high.

When the river's high, Iselle had said. That's when.

* * *

Saba began to weave on Tuesday morning, and she began to sing.

I'd heard her sing before, on the stair on Saturday night, the wrong-boy song with its last verse changed. But that was one song. At the loom it was different. At the loom she sang the way other people breathe. Old valley songs with too many verses, in the old valley tongue, one after another without a break, and the shuttle went back and forth to the time of them, and the beater came down on the beat.

The whole house heard. The great hall carries sound the way a well does. Mary came and sat on the bench by the door with her book. Faelan came and sat beside her with his laundry ledger and wrote nothing at all for an hour, which has never happened before. Little Uriah crawled the whole length of the hall from the door to the loom, very fast, and sat under it with his mouth open and stared up at the shuttle going back and forth over his head.

Iselle came and stood in the doorway.

She stood there a long time. Then she came in and sat down on the floor beside my son, under the loom, with her knees up and her back against the leg of it, the way she must have sat when she was very small, in the valley, telling the weather.

Saba didn't stop singing. But she looked down once, and her voice changed a little, and went on.

* * *

I was the one who worked it out. I want to put that down, not because I'm proud of it, but because I nearly didn't.

I was standing in the doorway of the great hall at two in the afternoon, watching Iselle under the loom with my son asleep in her lap now, and Saba singing, and the shuttle going, and I was thinking about the black page.

The page Malachar sent Iselle at the college. The one where the words came up wet out of the paper as he wrote them, all night. Where is she tonight. And at four in the morning, the last line, the one that frightened her worst:

The Ilvane is low this week. Your mother will have noticed. She sings slower when the mill is slow.

Iselle had never told anyone that. Never written it. Never said it aloud in nine years. Her mother sings at the loom to the time of the mill wheel, and the mill wheel turns to the time of the river, and small Iselle sat under the loom and told the weather by it. Nobody knew that but Iselle and Saba.

And Malachar.

Roderic had worked that out, when he named the trap. He'd been listening to her mother sing. That was how he knew.

I stood in the doorway and listened to Saba sing, and something went down my back like cold water.

There are other ways to be in a room, Malachar had said, than walking into it.

* * *

I found my father in the south solar with Eleanor and her old plan of the great hall, which she keeps weighted at the corners with teacups. I told him.

He didn't say anything for a while. Eleanor didn't either. She put her finger on the plan, on the east wall of the great hall, between the third and fourth windows, and left it there.

"The Castellan's blind spot," she said.

I'd forgotten. I don't know how I'd forgotten. The place on the east wall of the great hall that the Castellan has touched nine times and cannot remember. Nine times it's written the same thing on a slip of paper — East wall. Between the third and fourth windows. Something. — and nine times it's forgotten writing it. Eleanor keeps the slips in the drawer with my old notebook.

"That's where the loom is," I said.

"Yes," said Eleanor. "I know. I put it there. It had the best light." She took her finger off the plan. "I didn't think. I didn't think at all."

My father looked at the plan for a long time.

"We can move the loom," he said. "We can ask Saba to stop singing. We can put Iselle in the north tower with Carol and the Castellan at every window and Seraphina at the door."

"Yes," I said.

"Is that what you want?"

I thought about it. I really did. I thought about Malachar on his fourth step with his hands open on his knees. Is he kind. Did he ask her. Good. Then he'll do. I thought about Iselle saying, on Saturday, with her face wet: Somebody should tell him something good.

"No," I said. "But it isn't mine to want. It's theirs."

My father looked up at me then, and something in his face eased, the way it does when one of us says a thing he was hoping we'd say without his having to say it first.

"Go and ask them," he said.

* * *

I asked Saba first, because it was her song.

She was at the loom. She didn't stop weaving while I told her. She didn't stop singing, either, not exactly; she let the song go quiet, down to a hum, so she could hear me over it, and the shuttle kept going.

When I'd finished, she was quiet for a while. Then she said:

"I know."

I stared at her.

"I've known for nine years, love." She threw the shuttle. Beat. "The first winter after they took her, I sang at the loom every night because I didn't know what else to do. And one night the fire in my hearth went gold. Not red. Gold. Just for a moment. As though someone had opened a door somewhere very far away and the light had come through it." Shuttle. Beat. "It happened again the next night. And the next. Always when I sang. I knew whose light it was. I'd seen it once before, the day they came to the valley." She looked at me over the loom. "I stopped singing for a month. And then I thought: if he's listening, my girl's alive. Because why would he listen otherwise. So I started again. I sang every night for nine years. Slower when the river was low. Faster when it was high. So she'd know, wherever she was, if he told her."

"He told her," I said.

"I know. She said." Shuttle. Beat. "It frightened her. I'm sorry for that. But she's here."

I didn't know what to say.

"Will you stop?" I said. "If I ask? You can say no."

Saba threw the shuttle and caught it and laid it down on the cloth.

"No," she said. "I won't stop. I'll sing the last verse tonight, the one I changed. The one about the boy who stood up. If he's listening, he can hear it." She picked up the shuttle again. "He came and sat on my hearth for nine years without asking. Tonight he can come and sit in it with me knowing. That's the difference, isn't it? Between a thief and a guest."

* * *

Iselle said the same thing, differently.

She was still under the loom when I came back, with my son asleep across her knees. I crouched down so my head was level with hers, under the cloth, and told her.

She listened with her eyes shut.

"He said he'd tell me himself," she said, when I'd finished.

"Yes."

"Then let him." She opened her eyes. "He's never told me anything himself. Not once. In nine years. Everything was on a black page, or in a priest's mouth, or in a letter with a gold seal. It is time, little sister. This is what you are for." Her hand moved on my son's back, slowly. "If he wants to come and tell me something to my face, then I want to see his face when he does it. I've never seen it. Not really. Only from the bottom of a stair."

"You can say no."

"I know," said Iselle. "Garrick. I'm saying yes. I've been saying no to him for nine years. I'd like to see what happens if I don't."

* * *

So we didn't move the loom.

But we didn't do nothing, either. I'm not a fool, and neither's my father.

Seraphina sat on the bench by the hearth, with our son in her arms once he woke, and her free hand flat on the stone beside her. Carol sat at the end of the high table, very straight, with her hands folded in front of her and Ignatius beside her. Carol is the only person in the world who has ever held Malachar's hand still. A hand's width from her face, on the deck of his flagship. I could feel the cold coming off her from the other end of the hall.

Adriana sat on the floor beside Iselle, under the loom, with her back to the other leg. She'd given Iselle a refusal on Saturday: of anyone ever taking you from this house without your asking. She didn't say anything. She didn't need to. Adriana's refusals don't wear off.

Roderic was there, because there was no keeping him out. He'd been told he could sit. He'd been told so many times by so many people that he'd stopped arguing and simply sat, in the big chair someone had carried in from the little kitchen, about six feet from Iselle, with a blanket over his knees and his hands gripping the arms of the chair as though it were a horse that might bolt.

My father stood at the end of the hall by the door, in his socks. My mother stood beside him. Grandpa sat at the high table, sanding the ear of a wooden horse.

And I stood where I could see the east wall. Between the third and fourth windows. With my good eye on it.

The Castellan's lamp burned on the wall beside the door. Under it, on the slate, Mary had written in chalk, because the Castellan had asked her to:

Tell me if I forget.

* * *

Supper was in the great hall that night, at the long tables, the whole house. Helena's idea. If he wants to see her, Helena said, he can see her eat a proper supper with her family. It won't hurt him. Mutton and barley and bread and Helena's plum cake, which she makes for funerals and engagements and nothing else, because she says they're the only two occasions anybody's really hungry.

The fire in the great hearth was banked high. It was cold outside; the first real cold. The windows were black, with the lamps in them doubled.

Saba ate nothing. She sat at the loom through all of supper, weaving, singing low. Nobody asked her to stop.

And at nine, when the plates had gone and the plum cake had gone and Faelan had been sent to bed and refused, Saba began the wrong-boy song.

* * *

I don't have the old valley tongue. Iselle translated it for me afterward, and I've put it into Mary's book, but it doesn't go well into our words. It's a long song. A girl in a valley with a mill, and a boy from over the mountain, and everyone tells her he's the wrong boy, and her mother tells her, and the miller tells her, and the river tells her, and she marries him anyway. In the old ending, he takes her away over the mountain and the river goes dry.

Saba changed the last verse on Saturday night on the stair.

In her verse, the wrong boy doesn't take her anywhere. The girl asks him. And he says no, and then yes, and then he stands up.

Saba sang it slowly. Slower than I'd heard her sing anything. The shuttle went back and forth and the beater came down, and the cloth on the loom grew a finger's width, the color of the river when it's high.

She got to the last verse.

The fire went gold.

* * *

Not red. Not orange. Gold. All at once, from the bottom of the great hearth to the top of the flue, as though someone had opened a door very far away and the light had come through it.

Seraphina's hand on the stone went white-hot. I saw the stone under it glow.

Saba didn't stop singing.

The gold went out of the fire. It didn't die. It went. It came out of the hearth and across the floor in a long low line, like the light that comes under a door, past Seraphina's feet and the high table and Carol's folded hands and the big chair where Roderic was sitting with his knuckles white. It went all the way down the hall. To the east wall.

Between the third and fourth windows.

And stopped there, and stood up.

* * *

The Castellan's lamp by the door flickered.

I looked at it. I couldn't help it. The chalk on the slate was moving, by itself, in the Castellan's small neat hand, and what it wrote was:

East wall. Between the third and fourth windows. Something.

Then it stopped. The chalk hung in the air for a moment, trembling. And then, very slowly, as though it were pressing as hard as it could against something that didn't want to be written, it crossed out the last word and wrote another underneath.

Someone.

* * *

He was taller than he'd been on the steps. He was standing, for one thing, and he'd been sitting for a month. But it was more than that. On the steps in Cardle the light in him had been turned down, like a lamp near the end of its oil. Here it was turned up. Not all the way. But enough.

He was gold. The light came out of him rather than falling on him, so that he didn't throw a shadow, and the east windows behind him didn't show through. He was in the plain gray clothes he'd worn on the steps. Dusty. No crown. His hands were at his sides.

He didn't look at me. He didn't look at my father, or at Carol, or at Seraphina, whose hand had come off the stone and was resting now on our son's back with every bit of her ready behind it.

He looked at the loom.

At Saba, still weaving. Still singing. She hadn't stopped. She'd reached the last line of the last verse, the line about the boy who stood up, and she sang it straight through, steady, to the end, with her eyes on her cloth. Then she let the song go. The shuttle went across one more time and she caught it. The beater came down once.

The hall was so quiet I heard the fire settle.

Saba laid the shuttle down on the cloth.

* * *

He looked at her for a long time. Then he looked down, under the loom, where Iselle was sitting with her knees up and her back against the leg of it, the way she'd sat in the valley when she was small, with Adriana on one side and Roderic's chair six feet away on the other.

Iselle looked back at him.

She didn't get up. She didn't move at all. Her hands were open on her knees, the way his had been on the steps.

His mouth moved, the way it had at the corner when I told him she'd asked first. The place a smile would be.

"Little sister," said Malachar.

Then he turned, slowly, and looked at Saba. At the woman at the loom whose songs he'd sat inside for nine years without asking. And he did something I'd never seen him do. Not on the deck of his flagship, not on the steps, not in nine years of black pages and gold seals.

He bowed his head.

"I've come a long way to say something," he said. "And I find I don't know whose house this is, to ask." His voice was hoarse still, quieter than the fire. "So I'll ask the one at the loom. You'll know."

He lifted his head.

"May I come in?"

* * *

From Mary's book, that night, in a hand much less tidy than usual:

Tuesday. Grandpa mended the old loom from the west attic. The mice have moved to the stable. Saba says it's older than her.

Ned Toller said Mam. Anwen says his will take longer because he said he'd take it. She's not in a hurry.

Grenna said yes before Uriah finished asking. When the nights are long.

Saba has known for nine years he was listening. She sang anyway. So Iselle would know the river.

Plum cake. Faelan refused to go to bed.

Saba sang the wrong-boy song with the new last verse.

The fire went gold. The light went under the tables to the east wall, between the third and fourth windows. The Castellan wrote Something. Then it crossed it out and wrote Someone. It's the first time in ten tries it has remembered.

He called Iselle little sister. He bowed his head to Saba.

He asked if he could come in.

And under that, in a guest's hand, the only line in the book that night written before any of it happened. Saba had written it at the loom that afternoon, when Mary asked her, in brown ink, in small, plain, careful letters with long tails, the hand of a woman who learned to write late and only for the things that mattered:

Saba, who weaves, of the Ilvane valley where the mill is. I'd like it noted that I have sung at my loom every night for nine years for two people. One of them was my daughter. Tonight I'm going to sing for her, here, with her sitting where she used to sit. And if the other one is listening, I'd like it noted that this time I know, and this time it's my house, and this time he'll have to ask.